In today's busy world, receiving calls at inconvenient times can be very annoying, especially if a called party is not interested in the subject matter to which the calls relate, or if the called party receives repeated calls at inopportune times. There has been an increase in the number of automated calls (e.g., robocalls), which can be vexatious, or even fraudulent, in which many calls are automatically directed to called parties by an automated dialer (e.g., robocaller, robotic caller, robocall device, robotic calling device), which typically plays a pre-recorded message for the called parties. Additionally, there are many ways to mask a robocall as a legitimate call by “spoofing” the originating number, such that the automated call appears to a blocking system, as well as called party identities, as coming from a legitimate caller or legitimate source.
There has been some effort to reduce and even limit such calls by enforcing the laws in which called parties on a “do not call” list are not be called. However, most of these automated calls do not even originate from the United States. There are large call centers in remote corners of the world where U.S. laws are inapplicable, or the calling parties simply ignore the applicable laws. Additionally, there have been incidences in which robocall systems have been used maliciously to perpetrate fraudulent transactions. According to the federal communications commission (FCC), it received more than 214,000 complaints about unwanted calls in 2014.